Brigid Mcleer

So how do we begin?

I've been thinking how best to initiate this conversation, and I've decided that all I can do is speak from my own interests and see where that goes.
So - a sort of introductionramble - a preramble.. in an attempt to avoid the usual blurb about being an Irish artist and writer living and working in Devon, England etc. etc. I'd like to place this introduction - my arrival here in what I consider to be the 'foyer' of the project - in a time span that reaches back through the past 10 years of my life.
Since my last year of college in Belfast, my life and my work has been characterised by movements to and between countries, environments (urban, rural), houses, languages (cultural and artistic), communities, sexualities, roles,understandings etc.. I'm only really seeing now how much this endless moving and shifting is something that I have constantly been attempting to inhabit rather than control.
But I grew up in a very very settled environment in Ireland, with lots of relations living nearby and hundreds of years of family history locating 'us' in that place. So to feel a sense of not belonging was a violation as much as it was an absurdity to most of those people. I think of this past as affecting in some ways my desire both for stability, peace, identification and for inhabited flux.(the need to get away from other peoples 'knowing' of who and where you are is an intense and i'm sure familiar feeling to lots of people). And I think the tension between both those desires is what I make work about.
So the work is, in all respects, an articulation - a joint, a join, a hinge, a bridge etc. and a place to be. But as deCerteau says 'a bridge is ambiguous everywhere' - so how is it possible to be reconciled with that ambiguity? (How did/do the Florentines > live on that bridge?!)
Gregg said to me the other day when I joked about dealing with that 'inbetween' thing for long enough now, that "yeh, that was so 1999". And I do feel that despite it being an understanding of place that I am very immersed in, I also feel drawn to something much more 'sited'. Perhaps that's why I'm interested in architecture; its 'longing for a building' and writing; that can never be built with.
I've found that the writings I am doing that inform this project, the 'textplans' as I call them (and other bits and pieces) are very much like ruins, as much as they are suggestive of plans or blueprints - and in a similar way to how Bataille found in ruins the erotic of architecture, I find in these constructings/construings a sort of pleasuring (sexed/sexing) rubble (? not quite sure what I mean by that) - so not just ruins, but places pushed far enough into language's body that they can rearticulate what they once formed.
And yet of course increasingly our world manifests dynamic living sites - cyberspace being the most obvious of all. But how do we inhabit these sites? What does it mean to live in these psychogeographies? And how do we know who we are, when as Micheal Bell puts it, 'the distinction between self and space is not easlily defined'.

Just some initial questions and histories to get things going.
I've never been very keen on beginnings, so I hope you'll find time to respond soon (not terrible keen on endings either, i guess that's why places/conditions without these attract me. I do however like arrivals and departures, something to do with them marking points in a journey/movement rather than edges of a space/time, maybe??)

all the best,
Brigid

"the space I was looking for was the space of the living being, underlying each charge of identity, that was travelling through these spaces"
Jenny Lowe 'A Space: A Thousand Words'

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